| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | Visiting Glacier National Park when I was 10 with my family made a great impression on me. They have a trail called Going-to-the-Sun Road, which is the highest point in the park at 6,646 feet. It provides a great view of the entire park, including the remaining glaciers. I didn't know such beautiful places existed before that. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | I identify most with my mother as I think we share a lot of the same personality traits, such as extroversion and being able to understand a diverse array of individuals. I think this is advantageous for our professions; my mom is a psychotherapist, and I am training to be a child and adolescent psychiatrist. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | I admire passion developed from adversity. My great grandparents came to America from Scotland in the great famine to build a new life for themselves and their family. There are documents passed down from my family describing the discrimination they had to endure to fight for their American dream. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | This might be the hardest question I have had to answer because there are so many. There was the time my childhood dog got out of the house and ran around the downtown chili festival with me chasing after her. My dog was a Beagle, which involved two things: being too smart for her own good and following wherever her nose took her. The people at the festival were mostly laughing about it. She did get one person to give her their leftover chili, which is how I eventually caught her while she was eating. |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | This is a hard question but probably Japan for the food and the beautiful national parks. I heard someone say that half the reason people travel is for the food, which really resonates with me. I'm a huge fan of everything seafood, especially sushi. I think I'm going to end up leaving Japan with mercury poisoning when I eventually visit there. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | I want them to pursue a sustainable lifestyle that does not spoil the natural beauty of the earth. I believe that we are at a critical point in our planet's future and while things can go badly, I think recent innovations, such as the development of meat substitutes, can provide us the ability to leave the earth the same way we came into it. |
